A beautiful morning. Wallace weather. Then the sun came up. Here are those purple plants I’ve never identified along the west wall of the trailer. There is my neighbor’s famous little footpath with the stepping stones that are placed to emulate arthritis. Roland, that’s his name, and he should be back in a couple of months.
That’s his lattice to the right and my giant propane bottle, now empty, in the background. My ten o’clock didn’t answer his doorbell, so he must have forgotten. To bad, he needs software on his Sony that has to be installed correctly the first time. Fred needed some forms re-done, so I headed for the office.Then out to Pembroke Pines on a service call where I met a doctor who thinks I have a Canadian accent. It was an office setup after returning from an anti-virus cleaning. Fortunately all his files were there, but I had to lecture him on the importance of backups and not ever trusting a hard disk drive. This unexpected cash has me in good standing for the trip to DisneyWorld as soon as Marion calls. Furthermore, while in his office, I met a nurse who is very interested in my music program. If I could get just three days a week like this one, I’d be dancing.
Having the afternoon off, I raced straight to the library and luckily found an untaken corner away from the windows. With my dark sunglasses, I was ten degrees cooler than usual. That means good trivia. How about this fact – the Google headquarters employs more PhD’s in computer science than the staff at UC Berkeley. Probably gets more done, as well. That’s sixty of them, in case you are wondering.
I was researching advanced search operators, such as a “link:” command that can tell you who has linked to a site. Interesting possibilities there. I kept getting articles about Google’s privacy policy, but face it, they should not be keeping records that are of any interest to the authorities in the first place. What I did find, but cannot try out until tomorrow is a … well what is it.? A thing? It is a site where you try to the find the most obscure instances of two words back to back. It is called googlewhack. Anyway, if you want the definition of a word, say “inchoate”, you type in the search term [define:inchoate].
[Author's note 2016: the following description is what I now call the "Deltacomm Standard" for data entry. It precludes the use of double quotation marks as delimiters. Only unbelievable morons would use such a common punctuation mark for anything but its intended purpose. Programming is a field with more than its share of idiots.]
Oh, did I mention I am the inventor of that convention, the square brackets to indicate input on Internet text boxes? It resembles a DOS type of input field from the early 80s, but for some reason I am the only advocate of using it in a GUI. It means to type literally what is between the brackets but not the brackets. I decided on it after reading countless half-baked directions that used other punctuation and had to explain what was meant.
So if I say enter [scalene triangle], that is what you put in a text box. See what I mean? If you use quotation marks, some dummy will type in the quotation marks and some smarty will leave them out. Either can be a mistake. My way is better. If I want quotation marks, it would look like [“scalene triangle”]. Neat or what?
Even more trivia. Who remembers the Amphicar? That James Bond thingee you drove across the lake hoping to find a shoreline flat enough to drive back out. Around 3900 of these were built in Germany. The motor was roughly 40 hp, so it could outrun early lawn tractors. Anyway, the trivia is that something like 3500 of them were sold in the USA. Yet I’ve never seen one.
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